Major Rights Org: Blizzard Doesn't Respect the Human Rights of Its Customers

I am not sure how much HN cares about this story (it was mentioned twice, from what I saw, but I've been following it on Reddit where it's been a fixture of /r/all all week), but it's worth reading Blizzard's official statement:

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-...

Honestly, my takeaway from this entire situation is that we can't really win against Chinese influence. They use techniques that we find unimaginable and are unprepared to take on. They have state media that tells 1.4 billion people what to think, and if people have their own thoughts, they disappear never to be seen again. There is no way we can fight that at the scale of "buyers of computer games". Blizzard is a publicly-traded corporation, and therefore their main goal is to make as much money as possible; throwing a "we got you bro" over to China means that they have 1.4 billion more potential customers. Nobody who can be held legally accountable for "breach of fiduciary duty" is going to do anything to prevent themselves access to that market. If the casualty is some player of some children's card game, or a Dali Lama quote being deleted from Instagram, so be it. You can't go to prison for being a spineless bastard, but if you tank a Fortune 500 company's stock by standing up for human rights, you can. So it's not surprising what actions these companies are taking. We can't compete with China's system, and we can't resist a market that's 5x the size of the United States.

Where do we go from here? Two options:

1) Start your own game company. The inefficiency of large corporations is impressive at times. It took Blizzard 3 days to write 1 page of meaningless PR speak when their customers were about ready to burn down their headquarters. Can you do better than that? Then there is money to be made.

2) Ask for our government to push back against foreign interference. China has picked a good time to get aggressive with their agenda, because every country has their own problems that seem more pressing. The UK can't say "hey, you're violating our agreement about handing Hong Kong back to you" because they're distracted by Brexit. The US can't say, "hey, micro-managing political tweets is not OK", because our President is under investigation for seeking foreign interference in elections. The organizations with resources to fight the influence are busy with other things, leaving the future of our culture in the hands of the PR managers of "brands".

I don't blame Blizzard for getting swept along in this current. They are doing no worse or no better than anyone else. They just have a long history of doing the right thing, and a splashy page of benevolent-sounding corporate mottos. That's why we're mad at Blizzard, but we should probably be pretty disappointed with everyone. Nobody is leading by example here; everyone is willing to look the other way for human rights if it enriches their shareholders.

Anyway, end of rant. Sorry.

> the Blizzard controversy indicates just how badly the company has screwed up here, and the level of pressure that the community and anti-censorship activists are going to apply against it.

Got a good chuckle at "anti-censorship" activists. Last I looked that was the alt-right. Free speech is a dirty word associated with Nazis for many people today (especially outside the US). Find it terrifying how many of my enlightened friends consider blanket censorship and deplatforming a legitimate way to deal with unpleasant types.

Guessing the author is aware of that modern anti-censorship fervour is almost entirely isolated to a group of people not exactly popular with the audience.

Fixing negative connotations with a vague rebranding is the pinnacle of marketing and the antithesis of journalism.